ABOUT THIS EPISODE
AI is rapidly making its way into healthcare — helping clinicians identify deteriorating patients earlier, improving hospital flow and discharge planning, reducing administrative work, and beginning to change how and where care is delivered. But as hospitals adopt more and more AI tools, a new challenge is emerging: how do you manage, monitor and govern all of it?
In this episode of The Unlimited Podcast®, Brian speaks with Mara Lederman, Co-Founder of Signal 1, a healthcare technology company building the infrastructure health systems need to manage AI at scale.
Brian and Mara discuss her more than two decades as a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, her experience leading the Toronto site of the Creative Destruction Lab, and what she learned working alongside early-stage technology founders as AI began transforming industries. They also explore Mara’s own leap from professor to entrepreneur: why she left academia to co-found Signal 1 with Canadian AI entrepreneur Tomi Poutanen, how the company evolved from developing individual healthcare AI applications to helping health systems manage their broader AI portfolios, and what she has learned from making the transition from advising entrepreneurs to becoming one herself.
Mara Lederman is Co-Founder of Signal 1. She previously spent more than two decades on the faculty of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and served as Site Lead of the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto, where she worked extensively with early-stage technology companies and helped develop CDL’s health-focused programming. Mara holds a PhD in economics from MIT and an undergraduate degree in economics from Western University.
Timestamps
0:00 Intro and Disclaimer
4:38 Mara's path into academia
7:46 Teaching as the world evolves
11:38 Mara's role at the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL)
18:04 The beginning of Signal 1
24:55 "Pivoting" Signal 1
31:30 How is AI being used in healthcare?
37:03 Mara's vision of future healthcare
40:19 Setting students up for success
47:28 If Mara could do anything, what would it be?
49:50 Outro
